A lot of boat buying threads here are left “open ended” I thought I’d tell y’all the (hopefully) final outcome of our boat search
OK – so it took a couple of years for us to get to this point but we have finally made our minds up
(See thread
http://www.sailnet.com/forums/buying...-catalina.html)
In the end we decided to go for the Catalina 400 over the Bene 423.
As of yesterday we have an accepted offer on a Catalina 400 2002. Now we just have to go through survey and sea trial (should be fun in February weather…)
The deciding factor in the end was that after careful evaluation we decided that the Catalina 400 is probably a better “cruising machine” for our needs. We plan a 1 year sabbatical starting this coming fall and the C400 will also leave an additional $30-50K change for the cruising kitty compared to similarly equipped Bene 423’s that we looked at.
I would like to thank Brian (CD), Cam, Vasco, Dan Goldberg and all others that have given me good advice in these two threads
I will keep you posted on outcome of survey and freeze trial.